Six sharp raps at the door. Tivick scrambled to switch off the porn playing on one of the motel’s twenty-one channels. He zipped up, and went to answer it. There was the girl he’d picked up that morning, a soft moan escaping her lips. His eyes dropped from her doe-browns to the blood spreading like a Rorschach on her Disney t-shirt. He waved her in and caught her as she stumbled shy of the single queen. Her horse-tail braid got trapped as he grabbed her yanking her head back. She made a choking sound, but he got her onto the mattress and began to lift the T to examine the wound. She feebly pushed away his hands.
No, don’t.
He ignored her. Three of the five staples holding the incision together had pulled out. Blood oozed like cold maple syrup, pulsing with her heartbeat.
Geezus, what a mess.
He knew of the wound. As soon as her thumb had dropped, her backpack thrown in the back seat and her skinny ass had seated itself into his dark sedan, she’d been proud to reveal her bandage of sacrifice. Twenty-four hours prior she’d been in Philly donating a kidney to her father who’d not spoken to her since her arrest at seventeen for solicitation.
When the anesthesia faded like the ebbing tide, she’d popped all the oxy the nurse would give her and slapped bare footed down the hospital hallway to see her father. The look he gave her crushed the heart-candy she’d been saving for him these last six years.
You? They said your bother had come to donate. I’ve got your kidney inside me? Fuck.
When he turned away, she grit her teeth and walked out. The nurses became preoccupied with some freeway pileup so she dressed, grabbed the towels from the bathroom, slipped down the stairs and started hitching her way back west. With her looks, the Johns and Toms were eager to give her a lift.
After twenty minutes of story, driving in heavy rain outside Oklahoma City, Tivick held up his hand. Enough.
Sit and shut up, for now, he told her. I’ve got my own issues grindin’ like broken glass in my mind. I don’t need yours, too.
There on the bed, the girl thrown down like a discarded mannequin, Tivick couldn’t help but recall the other scenes etched in his brain bearing details so similar they made his throat clench. She needed medical, but there was no way he could get wrapped up in another incident like this.
By Colorado Springs, he couldn’t shut her up. Her story included the shitty treatment she’d received at the hands of the Santa Barbara model agency where she worked as a make-up assistant. She went on to describe the apartment she shared with a heroin addict and the tirade of promises and threats delivered by the junkie’s dealer.
We make sly green with that set ‘o struts and that sweet ass. Just have a lil’ taste.
Tivick dialed emergency from the motel’s phone, donned his shirt and shoes and grabbed his duffel. He’d rented her a room three down from his. He dropped his key on the dresser and grabbed hers from her pocket where he found her phone. Regretting each tap, he primed her contacts with his own.
Tivick. What a strange name. Kinda strong, kinda weird. Matches your face.
Thanks, I suppose. Maize. That’s a name pretty much before your time. Hell, my time, too. How’d you come by such a name?
Wasn’t long before he’d wished he hadn’t asked.
When the ambulance arrived he fingered the curtains from the other room hoping that they’d treat her right. The guilt throbbed in his chest, but less this time.
In the morning he resumed his journey.
Three months later, another sharp rap at the door. Same damn six knocks, two, two, two. His heart took a tiny leap. His mind, on the other hand, gave a groan.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
“I peaked at 33, downhill slide ever since.” This is the third consecutive time you mentioned being happier, younger. Thus my comment about you being sad or nostalgic….your bit on dementia felt a bit too personal, a bit too real. And crying…real men don’t cry…they simply fall apart…okay, I’ll shut up now…try to focus on what’s important…and what is important? Oh yeah. The writing. The writing is important…
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I kept reading this guy’s name as “TikTok” sorry 😂. I like the humorous touches throughout the story.
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Writing without proper dialog punctuation is a challenge, one, especially with all the flashback/forwards. It had me wondering if I could pull it off.
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I think you did good
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Punctuation wasn’t the issue. There are ways to get backstory, which is all flashback is, without going elliptical, using a prop or the slipped on a banana peel route. You’re never going to understand what I’m saying until you stop writing the way we think and learn to convert it to how we write, at the paragraph level. We’re here, we’re back there, no there’s this that goes with it, and then we’re back at the wagon. That’s how we create, not how we hit the page. That’s what you need to learn more than anything from these exercises – to see your story on the page, not yourself.
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September morn… Neil D. would understand. Time based hopscotch, not my cuppa.
Face it, by this stage, I’m prolly never gonna understand.
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Shit, you’re never gonna understand? I don’t even belong on the same page with you two!!!
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…a late, but honest, realization.
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That’s exactly what I’m talkin’ about!
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I was peaking one time when I looked through some curtains and saw the abominable snowman… or was that when Steely Dan’s Aja album played out like Shakespeare on the lawn… anyway, peaking through curtains should be avoided whenever possible…
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Ah, noted.
Other than that?
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We’re on the curve this month. If I were to comment it would be the usual gaffes we make in hurry, which we should be learning to correct. So “in a hurry” comes out better. If you would underwrite your soundbites that sound like writing and rely on the high quality guts of your content, your paragraph structure would improve and make it easier to rub a little vaseline on the seams so you don’t interrupt the flow with your writing. It’s like riding in a car with someone who rides the brakes. Straight up, slash and burn editor mode? Shit like this -There on the bed, the girl thrown down like a discarded mannequin, Tivick couldn’t help but recall the other scenes etched in his brain bearing details so similar they made his throat clench – is a waste of words on something that could grab us by the throat but doesn’t because it’s a string of writerly cliches and clauses that go nowhere. BAM. BAM. BAM. Makew that bloody girl jump off the page. Get the dude’s head time BAM BAM BAM. Make shit like that go BAM. And this is full of that. Politely? STFU and get out of its way. Flowery prose is fine, if you must, but make it count. Every. Fucking. Word. If it doesn;t go straight into the next word and mean something whack it. Get flowery on the motel carpet, not BAM emotional content.
But that’s just me.
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Just what I was lookin’ for. And I expect applicable to the extreme for scenes like this.
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What is peaking? Is that peeking or is that a word I shouldn’t know?
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Yeah, well, my Editor would have caught that (“Mom, get crackin’!”)
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When one is “fully on” a recreational (often illegal) drug, particularly a psychedelic they are/it is known as peaking. Whoa dude, did you see that? Tracers, dude, he wuggled his fingers in front of the lava lamp…”dooooood….”
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I peaked at 33, downhill slide ever since.
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33? 😡
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See I knew it was something nice girls like me don’t know.
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